“It is no joking matter,” he said. “Anyone who dares to be Rebecca has an instant price on his head. He is in danger of capture by the law and of betrayal by his followers. But yes, it is just the sort of thing you would have done. Thank goodness it is impossible.”
Geraint laughed. “You sound as if you care, Aled,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder. And is it impossible? Maybe that is just what this whole impossible situation needs, someone from my side to come over to your side—it is your side, isn’t it?—and force the issue a bit.”
“You are mad.” Aled bent down, scooped up a clump of soft earth, and threw it at his friend. It hit his shoulder and scattered down the front of his coat.
“Man,” Geraint said, brushing at himself and making the mess worse, “I should have you arrested for assaulting a peer of the realm. Or perhaps I should merely let my valet loose on you. I had better let you go home for your dinner. You are not quite comfortable with me, are you? But you are too loyal to an old friend to give me the cold shoulder.” He grinned. “So you give me a slightly muddy one instead.”
“It will give your valet something to do to earn his living,” Aled said, grinning too.
“Shall I tell him it was another, ah, accident?” Geraint asked, and they both chuckled.
He watched Aled make his way back to the village and still brushed absently at his coat. They had ended their encounter on a light note, both sensing perhaps that their friendship was treading thin ice. And it was very obvious that Aled knew all about the accidents that were not accidents at all. Geraint hoped somehow that his friend was not involved in them. They were a nuisance more than anything, but they disturbed him because they suggested that there were people who did not like him. An understatement, doubtless.
More disturbing, perhaps, was the knowledge that at the moment he did not much like himself.
For years, all through his school days, he had wished fervently that the old earl, his grandfather, had never discovered that his birth had been legitimate. He had often yearned to have his old life back, poverty and moorland hovel and near starvation and all. And to have his mother back. He had loved his mother with a fierce protectiveness. Those years had passed. He had grown accustomed to his new life and eventually he had come to like it, to identify fully with it.
Today, now, this moment was the first time in years he had wished he could go back. He had come to see privilege as responsibility too. One did not feel guilty about a privileged life when one also accepted the responsibilities that came with it. He had thought that he had done so. But he could see now that he had not at Tegfan. It had not been enough to appoint an efficient steward. He had abdicated his responsibilities and people had suffered as a consequence. And yet he saw now more than ever before that people of his class could not act as individuals for all their privileges. If they did not act as a class, as a unit, they might all crumble.
He did not feel proud of his class at that moment. And he did not particularly want to belong to it. He felt a strong nostalgia for those childhood days when only his own survival and his mother’s had been of importance to him.
Yes, he thought, he could not blame these people—his people—for disliking him. If he were still one of them, he would dislike him too. And he might well decide to do something about it. Help accidents to happen, perhaps. Or worse. If he were one of them, perhaps he really would lead them as Rebecca to larger, more organized, more forceful protests.
If he were one of them.
But he was not.
He turned his steps toward the house, feeling a growingly familiar weight of depression. And he thought about Aled and their strained friendship. And about Marged and her open hostility.
And about an eightieth birthday party to which he had inadvertently been invited. Tomorrow evening, he thought. Everyone in the community had been invited. Marged was to be there with her harp.
Marged.
In what hidden corner of his heart had he been carrying her for ten years?
Life was hard on the farms of Carmarthenshire. Each part of the year and, indeed, each part of the day brought its chores, enough to occupy both men and women, and often children too. And there was always the weather to contend with, and always the threat of poverty and possible ruin to bring constant anxiety. The spirits of the farmers and their wives and of other workmen had been bowed over the years. But not broken.
They believed strongly in community and in chapel and in music. They knew how to enjoy themselves when the opportunity presented itself.
Old Mrs. Howell, Morfydd Richards’s mother, had raised eight children, not counting the two who had died in infancy, and had worked side by side with her husband on their farm. For years she had been the leading contralto in chapel and for years she had brought home the solo prize for contraltos at every eisteddfod within a radius of twenty miles from Glynderi. For years there had been no Welsh cakes and no bara brith to match hers. Her talents as a cook were largely responsible for the fact that her husband had been almost as round as he was tall, people had used to say with affectionate humor. And no other woman had been able to spin wool quite as good as Mrs. Howell’s.
Her eightieth birthday was something to celebrate. There was scarcely an able-bodied adult or child who did not trudge to the Richards’s farmhouse in the hills above the river three miles from the village on the Thursday evening. And a merry gathering it was too, even though there were scarcely enough chairs to accommodate the elderly and scarcely enough space to hold everyone else standing.
“But never mind, though,” Dylan Owen said, setting an arm about Ceris Williams’s shoulders. “It do give one an excuse to get fresh.”
There was a great deal of chuckling as Ceris smiled and ducked out of the way.
“We could all get inside tidy, mind, Ianto,” Ifor Davies said, laughing, “if we moved the table outside.”
But there was a chorus of protests. The table was laden with food to such a degree that plates had to overlap one another. Mrs. Howell and Morfydd had been baking for two days, and not a woman guest had arrived without at least one plate of baking in each hand.
The farmers and their families ate sparingly and plainly throughout the year, but they knew what was due a party. They knew how to feast when there was good reason for a feast.
“Or if we put Marged’s harp in with the cows,” Eli Harris suggested.
“Don’t listen to him, Marged,” Olwen Harris said, digging an ample elbow into her husband’s ribs. “Eli do love a little bit of harp music. All the way up here he has been saying that if no one else brought it down for you, he would.”
“It was brought here at my request,” Mrs. Howell said from her place of honor beside the fire. “We will have music tonight and song to raise the thatch off the roof. Sing for our supper it will be, is it?”
Mari Bevan slapped the back of her young son’s hand as it tried to slide a jam tart off the table.
“Ow, Mam,” he protested.
“It is a good thing this room is crowded,” Glyn Bevan said sternly from some distance away. “It would be your backside getting tanned if I were over by there, boy.”
Idris Parry, invisible beneath the white cloth that covered the table and fell over its sides almost to the floor, licked the jam out of his own tart and caught crumbs of pastry with his free hand.